A Chilly Devil

AMD’s R9 390X may only be a rebadge of the company’s previous flagship R9 290X graphics card, but PowerColor has added its own set of special features onto it to turn it into another compelling product that enthusiasts would definitely want to get their hands on. Introducing the PowerColor R9 390X Devil.

The R9 390X Devil graphics card is unlike many other similar models in that PowerColor has stuck a water-cooling loop on the card. Decked in an all-black chassis, and slightly overclocked the card’s GPU from the stock 1,050MHz to 1,100MHz. Similar to the stock R9 390X, the Devil also comes with 8GBs of GDDR5 RAM.

The R9 390X Devil utilises a hybrid liquid-cooling system, where suck in air to cool down the VRMs and other components, while the GPU itself is cooled by a liquid-cooled radiator which sports a 120mm fan to dissipate the heat away from the radiator.

To power the Devil and the reservoir, an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCIe plugs are required, which at its highest power draw, requires roughly around the 300 to 350 Watt range, which is pretty high. As far as ports go, the R9 390X Devil comes with two DVI ports, and one DisplayPort and HDMI port each.

One thing we do need to mention is that the card is very large. The card alone eats up three PCIe expansion bays, and the inclusion of a radiator means that your chassis needs to be relatively large to be able to fit the card.

As far as performance levels go, the R9 390X Devil does very well, posting reasonably high scores in our benchmarks, whilst keeping temps low, to roughly around the 60 to 70 Celcius mark. Overclocking this card is also of no issue, as the water-cooling loops keeps the GPU cool enough even as you push it to the limit.

That being said, the price of keeping the card cooled comes at the price of noise. The radiator and the fan creates a fair bit of noise as the GPU is pushed while gaming or overclocking, although in our opinion it doesn’t affect much in way of immersion.

CHIP CONCLUDE: The PowerColor R9 390X graphics card is a great card to have if you can’t find the rare R9 Fury or Fury X cards in the market. The fact that PowerColor made a water-cooled version of this card shows that there is still life in a relatively dated GPU chipset.